Even now, it is amazing to see how the leaders among the Democracy, while pecking the South with the bill, continue to fondle it with the wing.  Again and again, since the war began, they have humiliated the North and encouraged the desperate foe by efforts at peace-parties, conciliations, outcries for amnesty, and entreaties not to ‘exasperate’ the enemy.  They have urged and advocated the maintenance of slavery, the great cause of Southern arrogance and secession, with as much zeal as any Southron of them all, and fiercely deprecated any allusion to a subject which can no more he kept from consciousness than can a deadly and madly irritating cancer.  Every suggestion, even the mildest and most equitable, for arranging this difficulty, has been stigmatized by them as out of place and time, while their press has, without exception, as we believe, given currency to statements denouncing directly as swindlers and prostitutes the innocent and well-meaning men and women who went South with the sole object of clothing, nursing, and teaching the disorganized masses of blacks set free by our army.  In all of this, we have a melancholy illustration of the difficulty with which unthinking men of the blind mass which rolls itself away into ‘parties,’ and follows its leaders, embrace new truths or shake off old habits of slavery.

While the modern Democratic party firmly believed—­as its majority still seems to—­that all this trouble was caused solely by the Abolitionists, and simply for the sake of liberating some four millions of blacks, they had at least some color for their iron conservatism.  European humanity did not agree with us; but we of America are more tropical in our feelings, and so we made up our minds that it was too bad to cut one another’s throats for the sake of benefiting certain ’fat and lazy niggers,’ who were probably rather better off as chattels than as free men.  But it is not from this point of view that the world is now beginning to view the subject.  Common-sense has ascertained clearly enough that without the agitation of Abolition, the South would have become intolerable and tyrannical—­it was imperious, sectional, and arrogant in the days of its weakness, while the Abolitionists scarcely existed, and given to secession for any and every cause.  The insolent, individual independence which prompted the wearing of weapons, wild law and wild life, free from mutual social obligations, contained within itself the germs of withdrawal from a civilized and superior people and a stable government.  For such men, one pretense served as well as another.  They of South-Carolina employed Nullification long before they dreamed of Anti-Abolition.